Well this is certainly disheartening as I'll be moving to Kansas City in a few months with my girlfriend as she attends medical school... My job hunt begins soon and all I'm hearing is negativity about KC.
If you want to work for ten different companies in three years (with at least eight going out of business while you're there) and never know whether you'll have a paycheck next quarter, then the Bay is the place. If you want a steady job that you'll get to keep for a while, you can do a lot worse than KC.
There's a lot of tech stuff going on in the area (Garmin's one company headquartered here; Sprint's a stone's throw away in Overland Park, Linux Pro magazine has its North American offices in Lawrence, etc.) and a lot of geeks, but not so much youth (as in "I graduated college last month" youth). Most of the techies you'll meet are in their late 20s or early/mid-30s, and have been in the industry for a while; quite a few of them have written unglamorous but indispensable tech books. Most have settled here to raise families. There's a lot less emphasis on doing things that make great blog posts or conference talks, and a lot more emphasis on doing things that solve problems in useful ways.
That's not to say there's no innovation, of course; Django came from Lawrence (close enough that a lot of people live there and commute to KC), there are some interesting startups doing stuff like e-gov and transparency, one of the best GIS groups anywhere (with a yearly conference at the University of Kansas), a lot of new-media consulting... but nearly all of it happens without fanfare and chest-thumping.
Anyway. The important thing is not to have an attitude of "oh crap, it's Kansas", because you'll never meet most of the interesting people that way.
One place to check out in your job hunt is Perceptive Software. A lot of the really good people I knew from my undergrad days (I went to KU, which is about 40 minutes from KC) ended up there. They have a dodgeball court, and seem to try and be a fun place to work.
Another popular option is Cerner. From what I have heard they have good pay and benefits, but expect lots of hours.
Whatever you do, don't work for Sprint. They employ a ton of people in the area, but there is a running joke that the halflife of a job at Sprint is about nine months. They are constantly hiring and laying people off, and the people they lay off seem to be totally arbitrary.
I live within a mile of Garmin HQ. Kansas City is a very different town from SF, but it is a great place to live. Especially if your going to be raising a family.
I'm a freelancer somehow surviving in Honolulu right now. It's expensive as hell. You'll figure it out! One cool thing to look forward to... Django was birthed in Kansas! I'd love to be surrounded by Django/Python jobs!
If you're into distributed computing and storage engineering, give SpiderOak a call. Or if not, drop a note when you land anyway; we'll at least invite you for lunch or something.
